SOURCE: "The Siege of Rome," in William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections, Vol. 1, Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1903, pp. 93-163.

James was an American novelist and short story writer valued for his psychological acuity and complex sense of artistic form. He also wrote literary criticism in which he developed his artistic ideals and applied them to the works of others. In the following excerpt, taken from a reminiscence of the period during which Fuller was living in Rome, James muses on Fuller's place in literary and intellectual history and in the personal histories of those who knew her.

The unquestionably haunting Margaret-ghost, looking out from her quiet little upper chamber at her lamentable doom, would perhaps be never so much to be caught by us as on some such occasion as this. What comes up is the wonderment of why she may, to any such...